Happy 2008!

I decided to start the new year off by completely redoing my web site. If you ever saw what I had here before, you’d agree that however this turns out, it’s much better than it was.

Having done this before, I know how much work it can be to build and maintain a site that at least looks pretty decent, not to mention has current information. I don’t know how well I’ll do keeping it up to date, but I know I didn’t want to try to build and maintain a personal site from scratch.

Since I’m a Mac guy, and I have Apple’s iLife application suite, I considered using iWeb to build this site. But I didn’t want to host it on mac.com. I do have a mac.com account, and I love it for keeping my data in sync, but I have my own domain and wanted to host it there. You can use your own domain with iWeb and mac.com. But I also run my own mail server and I don’t think you can (easily) have mac.com host your domain and still run your own mail server. You can also use iWeb to publish locally then put it on your own domain, but then you don’t get some of the features that you can get when you use mac.com, like commenting on blog posts and a couple other things. There were some other minor things about iWeb that bugged me, too.

Then I remembered Sandvox from Karelia. Wow! What a great product! It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn close. So far, there isn’t anything that I’ve wanted to do that I haven’t been able to do with Sandvox. Maybe not exactly how I’d do it if I were doing it myself. But good enough, and often better. I did shell out a little extra for the Pro Version because I knew I’d need it. But it was well worth it. Watching Karelia’s little intro movie really sold me.

I hope anyone reading this has a great start to their 2008. Happy New Year! Stay tuned for more (maybe, we’ll see)!